As is known in the art, radar receivers include circuitry for receiving electromagnetic radiation reflected by objects within a field of view of the radar system. Typical functions of a radar receiver include signal amplification at radio frequencies (RF), down-conversion to convert the RF frequency of the received signal to a lower, video frequency, signal filtering, and analog-to-digital conversion to provide a digital signal for further processing, such as by a Digital Signal Processor (DSP), in order to detect an object within the field of view. Typically, one or more RF preamplifiers, or simply amplifiers are provided in the receive signal path prior to (i.e., upstream of) the down-conversion. A video amplifier located downstream of the down-converter introduces additional gain and generally, has a low pass characteristic in order to reduce aliasing. Aliasing is a phenomena that occurs when the frequency of operation of the analog-to-digital converter is less than two times the frequency of the input signal. The result of aliasing is that the converted signal has ambiguous spurious responses of the input signal.
Such a radar receiver suffers from several design challenges. In the case of a bistatic radar system (i.e., a radar system having separate transmit and receive antennas, typically positioned proximate one another), a leakage signal corresponding to a portion of the RF signal emitted from the transmit antenna is coupled to the receive antenna without intercepting an object. Since the sensitivity of the radar system may be limited by the noise accompanying the portion of the transmitted signal which leaks into the receiver, conventionally such a leakage signal is filtered prior to processing the return signals.
A further challenge in designing a radar receiver is to compensate for temperature induced gain variations in the RF amplifier, which can be significant particularly in the case of a gallium arsenide (GaAs) amplifier. One way of compensating for temperature induced gain changes is to control the bias to the RF amplifier and thus its gain with a temperature varying voltage. However, this approach adversely affects the dynamic range of the receiver. Another approach used to compensate for temperature induced gain changes in the RF amplifier is to use a PIN diode attenuator in the RF portion of the receiver, with the gain of the PIN diodes controlled by a temperature sensitive device. However, PIN diodes are relatively expensive and add undesirable complexity to the circuit.